(2003) Overtaken (22 page)

The
decoration of the building site wasn’t premature Christmas illumination but
rather signalled the
Liverpool
premiere of Laurence Djaboff’s startling new production of Howard Brenton’s
play Christie in Love; a production which had been drawing ecstatic reviews in
every town it had so far played in. Ticket touts who usually worked six streets
over around the gates of Anfield Football Ground were wheedling at the invited
guests for spare tickets. In much the same way as my business had prospered
through my inattention, so it seemed that my investment in the play, though
made for ulterior motives, was also starting to turn a profit. Moreover, though
my backing was supposed to be anonymous, word was already starting to spread
in the arts world of a hot new impresario operating around the north-west:
after all, they said, who would have thought of backing a played-out old cunt
like Laurence Djaboff and inspiring him to do such remarkably good work?

More
strings of light bulbs led the excited, twittering, first-night audience across
duckboards to the pub, now hollowed out and waiting to be refitted with its
smart new architect-designed interior. For the next two weeks the space would
be arranged as a hundred-and-fifty-space theatre, the banked seating
surrounding on all sides the chicken-wired set inside which the police
constable was already in place, inexorably digging his way through the
knee-deep, screwed-up newspaper.

Feeling
like some provincial Irving Thalberg with the most beautiful girl in town on my
arm, I stood at the entrance to the pub welcoming the long snaking line of my
invited audience.
Florence
had
taken the night off from the cirKuss and stood beside me, my consort, dressed
in a grey Jill Sanders suit I’d bought her in
Manchester
.

It had
been an effort at first getting a lot of the arts establishment of
Liverpool
here, but now that they were they
felt a thrill go down their trousers when they saw that Machsi Gorci and most
of his family were also present. The Gorcis sat imperiously looking about them
as if they were at a boxing match, pleased to have stolen a march on the other
crime families and to. be getting their pictures in the papers for something other
than murder and mayhem. The remaining crime families, seeing these photos the
next day, assumed the Gorcis had found a new area to expand into, were getting
some financial rake-off or tax write-down from the show and for a while after. that
touring plays, comedians and dance companies received sinister visits from
frightening men. I’d had to do some lying in order to ensure that Paula and the
other relatives were invited for another night as they couldn’t be allowed to
see the person I regarded as the guest of honour, Sidney Maxton-Brown, who was
at that moment arriving at the site gate in an armoured personnel carrier
bearing the markings of Zhukov’s Soviet Sixth Guards Army.

‘Where’s
Barbara?’ I asked as he came towards me across the duckboards.

‘Oh, I
told her not to come, I said she wouldn’t understand it or know anybody. Hello,
Florence
, blurry hell you look
lovelier than ever.’

When he
looked at my girlfriend like that, one good eye shining with naked lust while
the other stared off into the corners of the world with a Noel Coward-like
ennui, I had to repress a violent internal shudder. All the time I’d spent with
Sidney
had not made me like the
man any more than I had the first time I’d met him. I reflected that my recent
experience couldn’t be one that many people had. Perhaps girls who worked for
escort agencies would understand what I was going through, spending, my time
going to plays and watching films with somebody that I hated and despised.
Except even the men those girls went out with hadn’t killed five of their
friends, so really the only escort girls who might understand something of what
I was experiencing would be ones who’d spent a few evenings with the Yorkshire
Ripper.

I
showed
Sidney
to his reserved
seat right on the front row, I sat on one side of him,
Florence
on the other: With childish eagerness he kept wriggling on the edge
of his seat. ‘I’m really looking forward to …’ he said, but never got to
finish as suddenly the constable’s head spun round to fix Sidney with maniacal
staring eyes, the house lights snapped out and the policeman pinned in a single
cold spotlight began to speak his filthy limericks.

I had read enough
biographies of Irving Berlin and Terence Rattigan to know that the impresario
threw a glittering after-show party on the first night. Mine was held in a big
tent across the other side of the site: I made a little speech and presented
Laurence with a gold Louis XIV yo-yo, there was free champagne and the latest
style of canapé — tiny sausages split with mashed potato piped into the slash,
quails eggs with slivers of toast sticking out of them, mini Yorkshire puddings
stuffed with beef and gravy.

Sidney
had been strangely quiet during the interval and afterwards I’d
been too busy receiving the congratulations of the many new friends I’d just
made to find out what effect the play had had on him. When things got a bit
quieter I went searching in the press and found him standing alone in a corner
staring into his flute of flat champagne. I said to him, ‘Hello, mate, are you
all right?’

There
was a pause, a sort of freezing you sometimes get when your satellite TV
picture is hit by sunspots.
Sidney
looked up as if seeing someone he didn’t know. ‘Oh, hi; Kelvin …
yeah, sure, fine. Where’s
Florence
?’

‘I
think last time I saw her she was asking Machsi Gorci’s mum why all her kids
were different colours.’

‘Right…’Then he said, his voice shaking a little, ‘Blimey, Kelvin, I know I’ve never
seen a play before but those three blokes have got to be fucking brilliant
actors! Do you know I had this weird feeling that they were doing like their
whole performance to me alone? As if they was doing it all just for me … I
suppose everybody feels that. But they really got the play over. I mean I’ve
always hated the police, well you would, yet I never realised before what it
must be like being a copper: interviewing nonces, telling people their kids are
dead, digging up bones at murder sites, going to all kinds of a-’ Here he
stopped.

‘All
kinds of what?’ I asked.

‘Accidents.’

‘Yeah,
accidents,’ I said. ‘They must see some terrible things, coppers, at all those
accidents, people with their guts hanging out, heads stove in, squashed flat by
trucks and that …’

‘I’m
sorry,’ said
Sidney
, ‘I feel a
bit odd … something I … I think I’d better go home. Will you phone the
nephew to bring the APC round the front?’

‘Sure I
will. Yeah, you go home,’ I said.

‘Will
you ring me a couple of times tomorrow?’

‘I’ll
look forward to it,’ I replied, and for the first time in our relationship I
meant what I said.

As
promised, I called Sidney twice on the day following the premiere of Christie
in Love and all through the week until I was free enough of business concerns
and able to take the time off to go and visit. On the phone he wasn’t able to
be specific about what was upsetting him, indeed I doubt whether he quite knew
what it was himself.

A
concerned-looking Barbara Maxton-Brown was waiting on the verandah to greet
me.

‘
Sidney
’s in bed,’ she said. ‘It’s not like
him. Now you’re here I’ll try and get him up.’

I went
into the lounge and waited. Eventually Sidney emerged still in his pyjamas with
a crumpled tartan dressinggown badly tied around him.

In
person
Sidney
was even less his
former bumptious self; he had the air of a man who had been unexpectedly turfed
off his charter plane into a vast and puzzling country, filled with sights and
wonders but whose rituals and manners were entirely strange and unfamiliar.

‘Hi,
how you doing?’ I asked.

‘Oh,
not too good,’ replied Sidney in a weary, tentative voice. “Ere,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’

‘You
know you told me to watch that QVC shopping channel because they had loads of
great bargains on there?’

‘Yeah,
that’s right.’

‘Well,
you didn’t tell me it’s fooking depressing; it seems to me a lot of those
people on there, they’re just buying stuff because they’re lonely and they’re
desperate for somebody to talk to and the only ones they can think of to talk
to is this fooking home shopping channel that’s abusin’ their misery. It’s
really upsetting me but somehow I can’t stop watching and I can’t stop buying
Beanie Owls.’

‘Hmm,
is that so?’ I said. ‘Well, I’m sorry you’re not feeling too good. What are you
doing during the day?’

‘I’m
watching too much telly and it’s all upsetting me; there was this couple on a
home make-over TV show and they just couldn’t find the right wallpaper and they
got really upset about it and then I got really upset about it, then I started
crying. It’s stupid, isn’t it, getting upset about wallpaper.’

‘Do you
think?’ I said. ‘I’ve wondered a lot about this and the thing is, we have no
way to measure pain, do we? I sometimes think that maybe the rich lady who
can’t find the right handbag or whatever and she gets really distressed, maybe
the amount of pain she’s feeling to her it’s the same as somebody who’s … oh,
I don’t know, lost all their friends in some kind of accident. Do you think
it’s the same or do you think there’s some quality to massive suffering that’s
different? What do you think,
Sidney
?’

‘I
don’t know,’ said
Sidney
, ‘I
don’t know.’

I said,
‘Well anyway, it’s not good for you hanging around the house all day getting
all lethargic, I think what you need is a little holiday. That’ll perk you
right up. So how about you and me take a little mini break to
Amsterdam
?’

I
bought myself a car, a silver one. I couldn’t recollect what make it was and
often I’d forget where I’d left it in supermarket car parks. I didn’t use it
much but guessed it was handy to have around. Mostly it stayed parked outside
my house.

In bed
one night,
Florence
and I were
talking when she suddenly said, ‘You know when you get new mobile phone then
the battery lasts maybe five, six days, how that make you feel?’

‘It
makes me feel like I can use my phone?’

‘No,
fool.’ She laughed. ‘It make you feel good. When your phone battery is strong
you feel strong.’

And
here I thought of what I hadn’t thought of for days: the accident, how I’d
imagined I could keep Loyd alive with my mobile phone. For such a long time
they’d been a strong constant in the front of my mind and now they were getting
indefinite and wispy like a faint fog, impossible to hold and grab on to.

Not
noticing my absorption Florence went on, ‘Now when you have your phone for a
long time, maybe a year or two and you have to recharge it every day, how you
feel then?’

‘Bad?’

‘That
right! When your battery weak you feel weak, so what I think would be a great
thing to have is a thing about size of small phone, small black box and you
charge it up and it stay charged for long time like twenty days.’

‘And
what else does it do?’

‘Nothing
— it just stay charged so you feel charged, you feel strong.’

‘Right,’
I said.

‘Well,
I been thinking I might like to be an inventor when I get too crippling with
arthritis to perform in the cirKuss and maybe I invent such a thing.’

I asked,
‘Do you have arthritis?’

‘No,
now I got to go pee,’ she said, sliding out of bed. I watched her exquisite
back as she disappeared into the bathroom.

As if
it knew we’d been talking about it my mobile phone, which was lying by the side
of the bed, starting vibrating until it fell off the bedside table and on to
the floor. Idly I picked it up. “Ello?’

‘Keep
away from her,’ a voice said.

‘Hi,
Valery,’ I replied. ‘How’s it going?’

‘You
keep away or you die …’

‘Yeah,
yeah, this is getting old … goodbye.’ And I broke the connection.

‘Who
was that?’ she asked, wriggling back under the sheets and rubbing herself
against me.

‘Just
business,’ I said.

It
rained a lot in early December, soaking the thick black soil to the consistency
of Christmas pudding. I could really have done without taking a trip to the
Netherlands
but I wanted to capitalise on
Sidney
’s wobbly state so I cleared some
space in my busy developer/arts entrepreneur schedule. Even so, in the end our
trip would have to be midweek because one of the few things I couldn’t cancel
was my first visit to Adam at the addiction treatment centre in
Surrey
.